If Maeve Binchy had been a mother ...

Does a female novelist need to have experienced motherhood to truly understand
human emotions?

Maeve Binchy, who had no children on whom to lavish her affectionsPhoto: Rex Features

By Amanda Craig

7:30AM BST 03 Aug 2012

Among the obituaries for the much-loved Irish novelist Maeve Binchy, few omitted to mention that she was childless. Once, that was the norm for successful women writers. These days, when even lesbian authors such as the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Emma Donoghue, writer of the Booker-nominated Room, have children, it is sufficiently rare to be remarked upon.

Yet the debate about whether motherhood and writing are compatible is still an issue discussed by magazines such as Mslexia, a specialist publication for female authors, and at almost any gathering of women writers. Do you miss out on something essential about the human condition if you eschew childbearing? Or is the pram in the hall, as Cyril Connolly said, the enemy of promise?

All working mothers are familiar with the double toll of raising a child while earning a living, and when you consider that only a handful of published authors can survive economically purely by writing, there is the added stress of trying to write creatively while doing another job too. Some do as P.D. James, a mother of two, did, rising at 5am to write for an hour before going to the office. Most create their books in what Helen Simpson calls “the interstices of our lives”.

I have often wondered whether the Orange Prize should be renamed the Navel Orange Prize, given the difference in time and energy available to women writers before and after motherhood. If any lingering prejudice against the female sex can be assumed to have vanished, which is debatable, there is no practical difference between a man and a woman writer when the latter has not had children.

After birth, it’s a different matter. “Every baby costs four books,” the novelist Candia McWilliam once claimed, and there are certainly years in which it seems to be the case. The toll isn’t only the physical one, of broken nights and infections passed on from playground to parents; it’s also intellectual as you strive to get your little darlings through their exams. I have recently revised for two sets of GCSEs (in subjects I don’t know, such as Ancient Greek and Russian) and am piloting an attempt to get into Oxbridge. As a result, my seventh novel is once again delayed.

All novelists who have had children are acutely aware that the very best of our sex — Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf ­— were childless. We all worry about doing two things badly rather than one thing well. Some novelist mothers, such as Antonia White, have been denounced as monsters of indifference by their children. I myself have a stern rule about not being interrupted when writing unless a child has broken a leg — but it isn’t, of course, obeyed. Even if you wanted to, you can’t ignore screams of pain, rage and misery.

Yet that same pain, rage and misery is also hugely enriching. It starts with your own, for even with pain relief, the shock of giving birth changes you for ever. The feelings of intense vulnerability (your own and, more importantly, your child’s), passionate love, joy, bewilderment and exhaustion are unlike anything else. Had Austen, for instance, had a child I wonder whether her focus on romantic love would have survived; childless Anne Elliot’s saintliness as an aunt in Persuasion would certainly have been mitigated by very different feelings.

Women without children can see and feel human life just as acutely and can imagine the feelings of parents convincingly. One of the best passages in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is when her hero, Thomas Cromwell, loses his daughters to disease. Mantel wrote movingly in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost on how undiagnosed endometriosis made her unable to have a baby. It is often the case, I feel, that in literature as in life, outsiders provide greater perspective and, sometimes, greater thought, rather than the bitterness about their lot often ascribed to them.

But what about the unique experience of living through something? A.S. Byatt, to my mind, goes much deeper into the emotions of it all, the tigerish nature of maternal love, presumably because she could draw on her own life, especially as one of her four children, her only son, was killed in a car accident at the age of 11. Her Booker-winning novel Possession hinges on a concealed birth; its power stems partly from the author’s perception of how torn and compromised her woman poet is.

Undoubtedly, though, what a childless writer does have is more time and energy. Even if you are truly, madly, deeply in love with your children, there are times when you envy those for whom the school holidays are not a total drain. Somehow, we are never the ones who get to work in Hawthornden Castle, the luxurious writers’ retreat which offers a month of working time uninterrupted by cooking, cleaning or child care. It’s no coincidence that women with children begin to win serious literary prizes once they are over 50.

All novels are written against seemingly impossible odds, of which having a child is only one. Modern women are extraordinarily lucky in that we can usually choose whether to become mothers; we are not limited to that inch of ivory on which Austen painted with her fine brush. Whether we use the larger canvas as well is another matter.

Maeve Binchy’s warmth and interest in other people included their families, but I can’t help but feel that her detailed portraits of ordinary life might not have been so predicated on the relationships between men and women had she had a child. “We’re nothing if we’re not loved,” she said in an interview. “When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really.”

No matter what your experience of adult love, there is nothing as strong as the bond between a mother and a child. One reason why so many contemporary women writers have focused on this is that it is new territory, precisely because the great female writers of the past had not experienced it.

Nor is this an unmixed blessing. Rachel Cusk caused outrage in books such as A Life’s Work by describing her frustration at the loss of her autonomy after giving birth; part of the power of the childless Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is her apprehension of all the worst aspects of raising a son. And all mothers born in the post-war years have experienced the shock of growing up with all the education and ambition once accorded only to men, then finding it hard even to remember times tables once you’ve had a baby.

Yet putting yourself last is one of the best things that can happen to a writer. I make no moral claims for motherhood ­— which can bring out the worst in a person, in the form of vicarious rivalry, bitchiness, envy and even mental illness — but going through the ring of fire does change you and bring about a deeper understanding of human nature.

Binchy, whose first novel was about a 20-year friendship between two women, didn’t need the experience of motherhood to write about love and friendship in a way that charmed millions. But she might have dug deeper, charming less but enlightening more, had she done so.

'Hearts and Minds’ by Amanda Craig (Abacus) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £8.99 plus £1.10 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk